“... This is a rather relaxed book. As such, it may disappoint those who know the author through his brilliant contributions to early Stuart history, or his recent principled interventions in debate in the House of Lords. Its aim, a truly ambitious one, is to trace the continuities between the liberalism of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and that of Liberal Democratic politics today ...”

“... a line of historical inevitability.’ In an attack on the whole ‘what if?’ genre of history, Richard J. Evans has suggested that ‘in practice … counterfactuals have been more or less a monopoly of the Right’ with Marxism as target. That’s not necessarily true of the Brenton volume, despite the inclusion of right-wing political historians like ...”

“... listening posts and much of the signals intelligence they collect. A reader of a Five Eyes brief may not know which state has collected the information they’re looking at without consulting the technical data. The NSA is by far the most powerful signals intelligence agency in the world, but global surveillance is a shared effort of the Anglosphere.The ...”

“... the public emotion. These long poems are not well known in the West, and it is very useful to have Richard Chappell’s version of 1905 in a paperback edition, with a translation in similar rhythms opposite the Russian. Equally valuable are Michael Harari’s Russian plus English translation of the poems written between 1955 and 1959, published in the same ...”

“... for the narrator’s habitual academic delivery, one baulks at this stilted sentence: ‘You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity [my italics] from that petty bourgeois atmosphere...’ This is exceptional and no worse than Hingley’s maladroit update in ...”

“... almost ineradicable. Bale’s previous book, The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, like Richard Hayton’s Reconstructing Conservatism?, attempted to explain how the party lost its way for so long, and then, eventually, found a path back into office, though not to single-party government. As late as the Tory semi-recovery of 2005, Bale notes, the ...”

“... competition of vulgar ‘empiricks’, often peddled their own proprietary nostrums. The great Dr Richard Mead hawked a rabies powder under his own name; Dr Hans Sloane marketed medicinal chocolate; Dr Nehemiah Grew took out a patent on Epsom Salts. How to make a medical reputation in such a world? How to make a medical living? A satirist advised the upwardly ...”

“... of her own generation or slightly older – figures such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra – and then with the promotion, through the journal October, which she co-founded in 1976, of a somewhat younger group of postmodern artists who substituted photographic imagery for painting, among them James Coleman, Louise Lawler and Cindy ...”

“... achieved by removing the structure of the suit to create a soft, sloping fit, as modelled by Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980) – a look much emulated in the City and on Wall Street. Fashion, Breward emphasises, is always provocative, endlessly recycling the aesthetic challenges of the fringe into mainstream culture. Paul Smith ...”

“... people’ to pass. Even if you find the apartment, you might not find Blam: he may have slipped out along the narrow walkway that crosses the roof, above ‘the abyss’ of Main Square. On the other hand, ‘if there were a search warrant out for him’ the mansard’s seclusion would ‘turn it into a trap’. If cornered he’d ...”

“... between 1918 and 1925, when they married, has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts’. In an excellent introduction they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her ...”

“... concise manner of expression gives him a real claim to be considered a distinguished writer. Sir Richard Jebb (1842-1905) devoted the main effort of his life to the making of an edition of Sophocles with commentary. In certain technical respects he was surpassed by his German contemporaries, while to modern taste he seems to make Sophoclean tragedy too much ...”

“... appear in texts from the period already carry a whiff of nostalgia. But a new book co-authored by Richard Rastall and Andrew Taylor sheds some light on the ways they worked and lived. Rastall and Taylor begin by explaining what minstrels were (no simple task). The word comes from the Anglo-Norman menestral, which could refer to a travelling musician or ...”

“... believed that the late work was an inspired adaptation to apparently intolerable conditions: It may be safely said that the curious and unique development of the art of pastel that this obstacle compelled him to evolve would not have come into being but for his affliction. A large scale became a necessity. For the shiny medium of oil paint was substituted ...”

“... by the massive 1988 exhibition of Degas’s work, and by the publication in the same year of Richard Thompson’s magisterial primer, Degas: The Nudes. Feminist art criticism, in particular, has added richness and edge to debates about the relationship between form and meaning. That relationship is the focus of Anthea Callen’s study of the ...”